Some New York Bricks

By Matthew Kilbane

This short essay pairs two poets who relied in their time on the materials of New York City — its brick and mortar, its shatterable glass — in order to test the promise that poetry matters. Naomi Replansky (1918-2023) and June Jordan (1936-2002) each found they could get poems to admit their own possibilities and limitations as forms of action in the world by writing about what shelters New Yorkers, what they can and cannot see through, what goes up in flames or breaks apart, and what endures. Readers of Gotham may be interested in the way this infrastructural imagery draws language back, again and again, to the particularities of New York history. For Replansky and Jordan, poetry’s most salient social meanings emerge from awareness of the city as an inexorably unfinished construction, something poets and their readers — neighbors, whatever their address — must build together.

Christopher Bell: Walking East Harlem

Interviewed by Rob Snyder

In Walking East Harlem: A Neighborhood Experience, published by Rutgers University Press, historian Christopher Bell introduces readers and walkers to places and people. Organized around three tours, Walking East Harlem takes in churches, mosques, and synagogues; old theaters and new murals; the homes of artists and activists; and the recent pressures of gentrification.

“this city gets in one’s blood stream with the invisibility of a lover”: City-Making as Queer Resistance in New York, 1950-2020

By Davy Knittle

Despite the importance of urban systems to how Lorde characterizes power and inequality, she is not thought of as an urbanist writer. But what becomes possible when we think of Lorde as such is a new approach to telling the familiar history of spatial and political change after urban renewal. As with many queer and trans writers active from the early moments of urban renewal to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Lorde uses city-making tools to provide new ways of relating to the city. Importantly, these queer and trans urbanist writers — from the New York School poet James Schuyler to the contemporary trans novelist Zeyn Joukhadar — propose uses, designs, plans, and policies for urban spaces and environments that are focused on facilitating the survival of marginalized people. […] Their work makes evident how, after urban renewal, a cultural imaginary of the single-family home came to define heteronormativity as a relationship to housing as well as to race, gender, and sexuality. It becomes necessary, then, to account for how built environments and normative ideas of race, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. have been co-constituted since the end of World War II in order to more fully tell both queer and trans history and the history of urban redevelopment in New York City.

How Greenwich Village Became America’s Bohemia

By Hugh Ryan

These women’s prisons believed there were only three legitimate jobs a woman could have: wife, maid, or nursemaid. For any of those jobs, a woman needed to be properly feminine (in the eyes of white Victorians). Any woman deemed not feminine enough (too masculine, too sexual, too willful, too Black, etc.) would inevitably end up unmarried and out of work, at which point she would become a prostitute. For this reason, reformers spent the late 1800s and the early 1900s developing a system of “women’s justice” that targeted women at younger ages and for smaller offenses, in order to get them into prisons where they would be forcibly feminized. As the annual report of the first women’s prison in America put it in 1875, their job was “to take these [women] and so remold, reconstruct and train them, as to be fitted to occupy the position assigned them by God, viz., wives, mothers, and educators of children” — a sentiment not far off from that expressed in a report on prostitution and the Women’s Court put together for Mayor LaGuardia in 1934, which stated that the best way to reform arrested women was “wholesome marriage and the responsibility for children.”

The Power Keys

Exhibition Review, “Robert Caro’s the Power Broker at 50” and “‘Turn Every Page’: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive,” New-York Historical Society.

By Fran Leadon

Those tiny notes, scrawled on index cards and scraps of paper and taped to lampshades or thumbtacked to his famous office corkboard, are included in two microscopically immersive exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, both of which showcase the society’s acquisition, five years ago, of Caro’s voluminous papers. That trove has now yielded “Robert Caro’s The Power Broker at 50” (curated by Meredith Mann), which focuses on Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning 1974 biography of Robert Moses, and “‘Turn Every Page’: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive” (curated by Michael Ryan, Edward O’Reilly, and Debra Schmidt Bach), which emphasizes the nitty-gritty of Caro’s writing process, especially as it relates to The Years of Lyndon Johnson, his sprawling four-volume biography of the 36th president (the long-awaited fifth volume is still in the offing).

In Brooklyn Heights, Private Schools Won So Integration Lost

By Rebecca Zimmerman

Public and private schools’ histories have often been told separately. By including private schools in the story of the attempted integration of Brooklyn Heights, we can better understand how they came to take on so much power. Furthermore, private schools are an underexplored actor within this tumultuous moment in New York City’s schools. With the added pressures of the 1964 school boycott and 1968 teacher strike, private schools got a unique boost from parents who gave up on public schooling. Those parents charted a course that continues to this day, with Brooklyn Heights private schools growing in both campus size and enrollment numbers over the second half of the twentieth century. This story also partly explains why New York’s public schools remain among the most segregated today.

Prithi Kanakamedala: Brooklynites

Interviewed by Katie Uva

At the end of the American Revolution, even as slavery was on the decline in places like Philadelphia, Boston, and neighboring Manhattan, slavery’s numbers strengthened in Brooklyn. And that traumatic history is intricately tied to the land. The economy in Kings County was still largely agricultural, and so it was the labor of enslaved people of African descent who made this land a capitalist possibility. Simply put, there would be no Brooklyn without the labor of unfree Brooklynites. That history deserves to be honored; we owe Black Brooklynites a debt today as New Yorkers. In addition, the idea of Brooklyn that we know today — a brand in its own right, with its own attitude and its own entrepreneurial spirit — all of that is deeply embedded in the history of its free Black communities.

Cookie Woolner: The Famous Lady Lovers

Interviewed by Katie Uva

By 1929, Black lady lovers were becoming so visible in Harlem that the powerful and popular pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., delivered one of the first known sermons that singled out the harm caused by queer women. The New York Age reported he declared, “homo-sexuality and sex perversion among women” has “grown into one of the most horrible debasing, alarming and damning vices of present day civilization.” Powell “asserted that it is not only prevalent to an unbelievable degree but that it is increasing day by day.” This shows the community pushback that accompanied the increasing awareness of Black women in Harlem who sought relationships with other women. 

Robert Polner: An Irish Passion for Justice

Interviewed by Robert W. Snyder

In the city of New York from the 1930s to the 1990s, Irish attorney Paul O’Dwyer was a fierce and enduring presence in courtrooms, on picket lines, and in contests for elected office. He was forever the advocate of the downtrodden and marginalized, fighting not only for Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland but for workers, radicals, Jews, and African Americans and against the Vietnam War.

Our Lady of the World’s Fair: After Moses and Cardinal Spellman Brought the Pietà to the Fair, They Brought the Pope

By Ruth D. Nelson

Many services and facilities were donated. A “Papal Visit News Center” was set up in the wing of a high-rise building at United Nations Plaza, courtesy of Alcoa Plaza Associates, and volunteers from two public-relations firms worked the telephones, typed, and mimeographed the latest updates. To ensure that not one car in the pope’s motorcade would hit a pothole, the city’s Department of Highways assigned a two-thousand-man crew to the streets along the motorcade route one week before the visit. New York streets never looked so good.